86

Fighting in these damn robes was going to be a chore, but Vi was glad she hadn’t worn her scandalous wetboy grays. Well, she’d worn them, but under the robes. Going into battle without her grays would be like going into battle with her hair unbound.

A blond man wider than he was tall brought his horse into the line next to her. A mage, she could tell. “Feir Cousat,” he said. “You Vi?”

She nodded. They were positioned ten ranks back, behind pikemen and shield bearers who were guarding the bridge in front of the dam. From their elevated position, they could see the whole valley.

A flag went up among Garuwashi’s men down in the market. The third time it waved, the Ceurans began marching toward the river. Lantano Garuwashi himself rode beside the front lines, and when he drew his sword, it glowed in the low light. A cheer went up.

Vi squinted at the sword. There was something wrong with it.

“What’s wrong?” Feir asked.

“The glow …did you make that?”

“What?! You can see that from here?”

“It just looks like you. Like your work, I mean. I don’t know.”

The highlanders who made up the center of the Khalidoran line were slow to react. They did nothing until half of Garuwashi’s five thousand had made the opposite bank. “What are they doing?” Feir asked. “The Khalidorans didn’t shoot any arrows.” Then the highlanders began trotting forward.

Garuwashi’s flag dropped when the highlanders were thirty paces away and a shrill keening shriek sounded from every Ceuran throat. Shrieking, they charged. To a man, the sa’ceurai ran with their long swords trailing behind them, the other hand extended forward. Charge was too inelegant a term.

Then the lines crashed together. The average highlander was taller and thicker than the average sa’ceurai, but as the clash of arms and rattle of armor resounded to where Vi watched, it was highlanders who fell ten to one. The sa’ceurai whipped their swords under and up, or over and down, or feinted and threw their shoulders into the highlanders instead.

“Best solo fighters in the world,” Feir said. “There are twice as many highlanders out there—and look.”

Within minutes, the rest of the sa’ceurai had made the crossing. As Feir had said, both sides fought man-to-man, breaking into a thousand duels, though neither side was above hamstringing an enemy whose back was turned. Despite the bulkiness that made the sa’ceurai’s lacquer armor look heavy, the men danced.

Lantano Garuwashi presided over it all, dealing death every time highlanders pushed through the lines to get to him, but mostly watching. The air around him winked and sparkled, and Vi figured those were arrows or magic the Khalidorans where shooting at him. A terrified-looking magus sat on a horse directly behind Garuwashi, making constant gestures as he protected the war leader.

Vi saw the effect of the meisters before she could see the meisters themselves. The sa’ceurai lines seemed to ripple back as if all of them had been struck at once. Then she saw green fireballs arcing over the highlanders to splatter among the sa’ceurai, the flame turning blue where it hit flesh and sizzling, black smoke rising from a hundred bodies on fire.

In that instant, the sa’ceurai advance faltered. Lantano Garuwashi waved his hand forward frantically, and his standard bearer was waving a flag furiously, but his men sank back. A dozen green fireballs splattered against Garuwashi’s shields and they nearly collapsed. He sawed his horse’s head back toward the river and joined his men’s retreat, waving his hands and cursing them all the way.

A cry went up from the highlanders and they surged forward. They’d routed the Ceurans.

But from the rear, where the Khalidorans couldn’t see, it looked all wrong. While those in the front made big, panicky gestures, none threw down their weapons as they fled. The sa’ceurai closest to the river sheathed their blades and calmly carried the wounded between them in twos. Lantano Garuwashi’s frenzied waving, the whipping flag—it hadn’t been the same flag he’d used for the advance, had it?—it was all a setup.

“Palies comin’!” someone shouted.

Across the bridge in front of Vi, hundreds of Khalidoran soldiers were running to their places. Their archers loosed a flight of arrows. Feir threw his hands up and a shimmering transparent blue sheet of magic unrolled above the Cenarians, covering those at the foot of the bridge. The first arrows hit the shield and, to Vi’s surprise, didn’t burst into flame. Rather, they hit the shield like it was a pincushion, poked through it, and robbed of all speed, simply dropped the last five feet onto the Cenarians.

“Archers, shoot from outside the umbrella!” Feir shouted, but not before several of them had loosed shots into it. The outgoing arrows stabbed through the umbrella, flew half a dozen feet, then came to rest back on top of the umbrella again, lacking even the energy to make it back to the ground.

“Meisters!” someone screamed.

Before Vi found the dark figure across the bridge, something blasted her from her saddle. She met the rocky ground with far less speed than she had any right to expect.

“Make that ‘vürdmeisters,’” Feir said, helping her up. “The bastards.”

“You saved me,” Vi said, noticing the unfamiliar shield around her as she stood.

“You owe me. Now do something. I’m tapped out.”

A dozen green fireballs of various sizes arced across the bridge. Vi fumbled for her Talent, but her ears were still ringing. She was too slow.

Nonetheless, every one of the Khalidorans’ falling fireballs was lifted like an arrow catching a sudden updraft, then curved in the air and smashed back into the Khalidoran lines. A woman whooped, and Vi recognized Sister Rhoga’s voice. Vi’s battle magae had practiced that weave for four days straight, but seeing it actually work took Vi’s breath away.

Vi couldn’t find her horse, though she had no idea how it could have gone anywhere through the massed ranks of pikemen, archers, and shield bearers who were holding the foot of Black Bridge. She pushed her way to the front.

The men maintaining the shield wall at the front line looked at her. Their shields were studded with dozens of arrows each. The Khalidoran archers had figured out that if they shot at a low enough trajectory, they could find targets here. “How much cover you want, Sister?” a skinny officer at least twenty years her senior asked. The first row of soldiers were on one knee, their shields covering them completely; the second row held their shields at an angle and a third held theirs overhead despite the umbrella. They were packed as tightly as possible.

“You, rest,” Vi told a man in the second row. She pushed her way into place and poked her head through the shields.

She found the Vürdmeister by the swirling black vir-shield spinning in front of him. A moment later, half a dozen darts of mage fire plunged into his shield, magic breaking and spitting and sizzling in chunks on the bridge at his feet, but the Vürdmeister barely seemed to notice. He was looking down the river toward the ford at the Great Market.

The Khalidoran highlanders had pursued the sa’ceurai across the river, and thousands had now gained the Cenarian side. Vi’s heart jumped into her throat.

A blue flare streaked into the sky over the Great Market. To Vi’s right, a magus struggled out onto the narrow stone walkway that ran across the face of the dam. Because the waters poured over the top of the dam rather than through its centuries-closed sluices, the magus made his way through a deluge as water poured from fifty feet overhead. He held the handrail and climbed forward, hand over hand, struggling to keep his feet anchored to the stone. At the center of the walkway were two enormous pulleys, the chains wrapped around them still pristine. The chains themselves disappeared into the face of the dam where they would open the sluice gates. The magus threw thick blue ropes of magic at each of the pulleys, straining.